Idle Doodles by Famous Authors

Everybody doodles. There’s just something about an idle moment and a blank space on a page that invites a little design or two. Plus, there is some evidence that active doodlers are also active thinkers and imaginers. After all, John Keats doodled flowers in the margins of his manuscripts, and Leonardo DaVinci is famous for his love of doodling. There’s even a whole book dedicated to the doodles our various presidents have scribbled – we hope not while they were supposed to be paying attention to anything important. But everybody’s doodles are different – like dreams, they are culled directly from the loose bits floating around in our brains, and their expression is really only inhibited by the doodler’s physical abilities and/or hand-eye coordination. Authors – especially those who wrote with pens instead of those soulless computer things – are prime doodlers. They have a million ideas going through their heads at once, so it makes sense that something would spill out as a little drawing on the side. Check out our gallery of doodles by famous authors, and let us know what (if anything) you think it tells us about them.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath liked to doodle in her diaries, creating illustrations of her life, her dreams, and in this case, her nightmare about being chased by a hot dog and a marshmallow.

When recipients were willing, Ginsberg would often inscribe books with a little something extra. We’re not sure what to make of all the “AH”s – anyone know? Our best guess: the seed syllable ‘ah’ in ‘Om Ah Hum’.

Okay, so these are more than idle doodles – they’re instructions to Twain’s printer regarding the weather indicators he drew at the start of each chapter, “to save the space usually devoted to explanations of the state of the weather in books of this kind.” Always thinking, that Mark Twain.

Vonnegut’s doodles are well known, as they have been incorporated into many editions of his work and are even serving as elements of the covers in recent printings. However, that doesn’t make them any less great. You know what that asterisk is.

Charles Bukowski

This doodle is attached to a letter he wrote to the Sycamore Review, published in issue 3.2. We have no idea what it is supposed to be. A “good doggie”? A guy with a big nose and a bottle of whiskey? We don’t know.